From window and balcony overlooking the Linden I could now see or hear at intervals detachments of Berlin regiments, Uhlans or Infantry of the Guard, or a battery of light artillery, swinging along to railway stations to entrain for the front. Occasionally battalions of provincial regiments, distinguishable because the men did not tower into space like Berlin’s guardsmen, crossed town en route from one train to another. The men seemed happier than I had ever before seen German soldiers. That was the only difference, or at least the principal one. The prospect of soon becoming cannon-fodder was evidently far from depressing. Most of them carried flowers entwined round the rifle barrel or protruding from its mouth. Here and there a bouquet dangled rakishly from a helmet. Now and then a flaxen-haired Prussian girl would step into the street and press a posey into some trooper’s grimy hand. Yet, except for the fact that the soldiers were all in field gray, (I wonder when the Kaiser’s military tailors began making those millions of gray uniforms!) with even their familiar spiked headpiece masked in canvas of the same hue, the Kaiser’s fighting men marching off to battle might have been carrying out a workaday route-march. Then, suddenly, a company or a whole battalion would break into song, and the crowd, trailing alongside the bass-drum of the band, just as in peace times, would take up the refrain, and presently half-a-mile of _Unter den Linden_ was echoing with _Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles_, and I knew that the Fatherland was at war.